Koopa Guitar

By now I bet everyone has seen the above guitar around the internet and drooled over it. When I first saw it my mind went to an unsavory area for damn sure. Thoughts of schemes and plots and dark alleys filled my head all in the name of obtaining that unobtainium. But then after the fog lifted I realized I don’t have any musical skills at all. AT ALL. It’s sad really because I always wanted to play an instrument. But unlike Lisa Simpson my stubby fingers have forbade me from developing skills to play. Regardless of all that, I truly love the artistry that goes into guitar making. When my friends and I road tripped over to Memphis, one of the highlights was visiting the Gibson Guitar factory and taking a tour. It seemed like each guitar wasn’t being made as so much it was being born. At the end of the tour you could tell that in each of our heads the wheels were spinning on how we could possibly swing the 1500 bucks to purchase one of these guitars. However, we were in college and dirt poor and while stupid, not that stupid.

I’ve always had a strange fascination with guitars. Not so much in the playing aspect because I can’t, but on their design and how people personalize them. Just take a look at my friend Justin’s guitars-

Justin once expressed regret for putting those stickers on his guitars. He did them back when he was a teenager and just never took them off. Probably wouldn’t go well on the finish in any case. Regardless of his feelings, after knowing Justin for about eight years and living with him for two (not in a romantic way but there were moments) the stickers are a total expression of who he is and how he plays music. So even if he doesn’t like them they make what would be standard musical instruments into his instruments.

As you can see the builder of this custom guitar is awesome. He built a fully functioning electric guitar in the shape of a Koopa Troopa. I can’t imagine the final price this thing would fetch on eBay or etsy. Probably a few grand for sure. It did get me thinking though as to what other game guitars are out there so I decided to take a trip down Google’s image search to see what I could find.

I came across many face-plates at first. I forgot about Rock Band and Guitar hero when I started this journey so I literally came across dozens of images similar to the above one. Games ranging from Halo to Zelda. I liked the one above but the asking price was north of 80 bucks so I didn’t like it that much. Especially for a face-plate to a crappy plastic guitar for an over the hill game genre.

I dug a little deeper and came across the two gems above. However, I can’t really decide which one I like better. I always thought the famicon style NES was a nicer design then the one we got but I don’t have the memories attached to it. Either one though would get you some serious “cred” if I saw you jamming on them though. And just to show everyone that I am not all Nintendo fanboy, all the time, here is a picture of a douchey looking fellow playing his Genesis guitar-

At least it’s the cool Genesis with the headphone jack and not the smaller one that actually fit the CD Drive add-on in a nice looking way.

But as cool as the console guitars are they still don’t hold a candle to the Koopa Troopa masterpiece. I got bummed. I surely thought that there would be others out there that loved video games and guitars. Thankfully, I didn’t stop my search upon seeing douchey Mr. Genesis. Nope, I dug a little further and deeper. Past the pages of random porn that a Google safe search couldn’t even filter out. Finally, I came across something on par with the Koopa.

Sonic was never my thing, though, I respect him as a mascot. However, I always enjoyed his Saturday morning ABC cartoon more then any of his games. His games never took as much skill as much as they required a lot of luck. At least that was my perception of the early games, I could have just sucked at them. In any case, as a custom guitar lover I give a lot of “props” to the builder and owner of the Sonic head guitar. Clearly a lot of love went into it.

Now to prove that this isn’t some random post –

That’s a picture of my Fender Bass that I still can’t play. Jess was kind enough to get me that sweet Gabe sticker from PAX 2008. While it doesn’t come close to the designs of some of the above guitars I picked, it still works for me quite nicely. And even though I didn’t do it as a teenager it suits me pretty well and is a good start to a collection I probably will never afford or have.